Since we've submitted the new implementation of the NSXML... classes
based on libxml2 and people are beginning to use them, I thought I
would mention some remaining unresolved issues in the hope that other
people might have more experience with the libxml2 libraries and have
some ideas about how to solve them. These are currently the top
issues on my list:
1. Parsing an XML document generates text nodes in the tree for
whitespace between elements even when the XML_PARSE_NOBLANKS option
is given. Cocoa doesn't do this.
2. Find a way to control formatting of "empty" nodes. Cocoa has the
options NSXMLNodeExpandEmptyElement and NSXMLNodeCompactEmptyElement
to control whether an empty node foo is displayed as "<foo></foo>" or
as"<foo/>" . Currently our libxml2 implementation will only display
the latter.
3. Find a way to control "pretty-print" formatting. Cocoa has an
option NSXMLNodePrettyPrint to control whether a string
representation of a tree will include indentation for enhanced
readability or not. Currently our libxml2 implementation always
includes indentation.
I have searched the libxml2 documentation for ways to control these
issues but haven't come up with anything that works (in particular I
tried the xmlKeepBlanksDefault() function for issue 1 without any
success).